


The Sign and the Hurricane

by etirabys



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-27 02:51:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20753123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etirabys/pseuds/etirabys
Summary: Five times Attolia was visited by a god. One time she got married to one.





	The Sign and the Hurricane

  
The new queen of Attolia was seventeen, and fighting anger at finding a man on her private garden. It was well into the middle of the night. He was leaning against the marble balustrade, facing away from her, not fifteen feet away from the arched gate from which she'd emerged. He was slight, and dressed like a laborer.

"You there! This is the royal garden." These days she could make her voice ring like a bell, at a pitch that cut through babble in stuffy rooms. It cut through the fog of people's minds when they were confused about obeying her. "Remove yourself immediately and report to the guard for discipline."

He turned around, tipping from elbow to elbow so that he settled in a position of leaning back against the balustrade again on his elbows again. Absurdly, she noted that his shoes were very fine, supple leather, laced and not buckled. She looked at his face, and the muscles of her legs went liquid for a second. He was unarguably divine.

The queen of Attolia couldn't have said what it was. Perhaps it was a subtle strangeness in the way his clothes settled against his skin, or the way the moonlight lit up the curve of his cheekbone and eyelids. Whatever it was, it charged the air. There was a breeze against her skin, she felt it, but she also felt the stillness of a temple. The silence after a thunderclap.

Her knees almost buckled, but she didn't move. Attolia wasn't particularly religious. The country or the monarch. She had poured expensive wine for ceremonial occasions. She had studied the history of religious architecture. Like everyone, she'd grown up on the stories. She didn't believe. If there were minds that were not human minds, and hands stronger than human hands, they were so immensely distant and abstract as to be irrelevant. In her seventeen years of life, she'd encountered nothing to change her mind on this.

"My god," she said. Her voice, damn it, shook. "Why have you visited me?"

"Curiosity," he said. "And avarice, of the common sort."

He took one step closer. She said, "Which god are you?", and winced at herself. She had spent the past year never allowing any note of subservience to creep into her voice. She had not expected to ever need to, again.

"The god of being where you shouldn't be." He smiled suddenly, as if in sheer delight of his own existence. "The god of trespass and the illicit. The god of making something that is yours no longer yours, or something that is hidden no longer hidden. The god of taking away, and sometimes, giving."

She knew him. "Eugenides." The sole member of the old pantheon who had been born a man, and had stolen his immortality.

He smiled wider. He was an assemblage of shadow and light, but not the same kind that lit her own hand or her guards under moonlight. The shadow was made of the subtle deep shadows in a dim room that might hide anything. The light was the light of a crescent moon. The poetry that leapt into her mind disturbed her – this was not the normal cant of her thoughts.

She was bold. "Have you come to steal from me?"

"From you? No. If I am making any acquisition tonight, it is not a thing," he said. He extended his hand. "You cry yourself to sleep sometimes, and no one touches you kindly. I think this is a great pity. May I spirit you away?"

She bit her tongue to halt the exclaimed rejection. One did not speak that way to a god, even if he said things that would be impudent enough to warrant execution in a man. "I am holding together too much," she whispered. Images crowded into her head: barons going to war, crops burned, trade halting. Dye flowing into banners, and blood into dust.

"Yes, and if you keep yourself yoked to the center, it will tear you apart."

"Then let it tear me apart," she said. "It will take years. I am Attolia."

Eugenides let his hand drop. "I love to meet the bright and true ones." He padded towards her – making no sound at all – and took her hand. Attolia almost exclaimed.

He lifted the knuckles of her hand and pressed them to his warm cheek. "They will learn to love you," he promised, smiling, and was gone.


End file.
